Goodbye (Bé omid é didar)

GOODBYE (Bé omid é didar)        C             
Iran  (100 mi)  2011  d:  Mohammad Rasoulof

Along with Jafar Panahi, this director was arrested in March 2010 after calling the election results of the June 2009 re-election of Iranian President Ahmadinejad a fraud, effectively calling it a dictatorship where artists in Iran may no longer speak freely.  Both were sentenced to six years in prison for “propagandizing against the regime,” where Panahi remains imprisoned while Rasoulof was released under house arrest.  This is a film that is a product of its political circumstances, as it was made while the director was under house arrest, seriously limiting the opportunities for filming on location, shooting nearly the entire film indoors.  This is a complete 360 degree turn from his previous film, The White Meadows (Keshtzar haye sepid) (2010), a near mythological experience filmed in the eerie white islands of Lake Urmia in the northwestern part of Iran close to Azerbaijan, the largest lake in the Middle East and the third largest saltwater lake in the world.  That film took full advantage of its surreal on location shooting, while this film is admittedly restricted, becoming suffocatingly cramped over time.  The entire film features the plight of a single person, Noora (Leyla Zareh), onscreen throughout the entire film, a human rights lawyer who has had her license pulled and is essentially out of work, also currently apart from her husband who is a journalist on assignment.  We follow her as she makes repeated trips to the doctor, as she’s pregnant, but necessary tests will not be authorized unless she provides signed permission from her husband, which is of course impossible.  She’s also attempting to get their passports in order for a possible trip abroad, again, impossible without the signed permission of her husband.  There are more inevitable complications while this same obstacle recurs multiple times in the film.  

It’s an Orwellian film that reeks of the presence of Big Brother government constantly looking over her shoulder, as she’s actually visited unannounced several times in her home by a government team that removes her satellite connection, computer equipment, and anything else connecting her to the outside world, even some professional papers, where after awhile one suspects her entire apartment is bugged as well.  Her threat to the regime is that she’s an intelligent, well educated woman, where her growing exasperation is continually being treated like an elementary school child who is required to provide a permission slip from her husband to receive any social service.  Every visit to a different official also involves expected payments of cash, as the system is notoriously corrupt, where each level of the bureaucracy needs its own rewards.  Getting more fed up over time, she utters to a friend, “If you feel like a foreigner in your own land, it’s better to be a foreigner abroad,” an existential quotation that feels right out of The Stranger (L’Etranger) by Albert Camus, especially because the writer also explores the absurdism of human existence.  The only absurdity shown here is a government official’s closed covered window with a small hole at the bottom for people to bend down and speak into, never allowing anyone to view the official they’re speaking to, like something out of the dark days of Eastern Europe.    

The film is reminiscent of an earlier film by Rakhshan Bani-Etemad, considered Iran’s leading female filmmaker, called THE MAY LADY (1997), which is another woman’s portrait, a modern woman in a modern city in a modern apartment, expressed as an existentialist essay in the emotionally detached manner of Godard, a lifeless and tiresome film that examines the life of a self-absorbed, divorced, middle-aged professional filmmaker who is attempting to raise her teenage son alone, manage her career, and respond to developing feelings in her life from a new relationship which appears to benefit her yet alienate her son, an emotionless film defined by an inertia of ambivalence.  But this movie never varies its gloomy, downbeat tone, dominated by a grayish color scheme, and never once offers even a hint of humor, feeling excessively fatalistic and downright morbid after awhile.  While it may take courage to release a film like this while under arrest, it’s a monotonous and overly repetitive effort where the theme of the movie is clear in the opening five minutes, a hastily put together portrait of a largely unseen totalitarian presence, where one can easily predict the outcome, but the director puts us through the grueling step by step routine of her harrowing existence, where her life is defined by the lack of freedom, stuck in the bottomless pit of Sartre’s No Exit.

You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet (Vous n'avez encore rien vu)

YOU AIN’T SEEN NOTHIN’ YET (Vous n'avez encore rien vu)        C   
France  Germany  (115 mi)  2012  ‘Scope  d:  Alain Resnais 

This is another of a recent series of aging filmmakers to express themselves through sheer artificiality, much like Manoel de Oliveira, 100-years old and still counting, and the recently deceased Raúl Ruiz, whose immersion into literary source material often leaves their films rigid and lifeless onscreen, so stark in execution that the viewer ends up spending a majority of time simply reading the subtitles, as these are films with non-stop verbiage, almost as if the filmmakers preferred stories that were read to the audience.  While the last film of Resnais, Wild Grass (Les Herbes Folles) (2009), couldn’t have been more playfully energetic with its quirky story of near forgotten moments leading to a budding romance, intoxicating with its impressionistic blur of neon-lit colors, where it obviously had plenty of whimsical fun with its own conceptual design.  Not so here, where you’ll be hard pressed to find any ounce of spontaneity or flair for life in this film, a re-enactment of French playwright Jean Anouilh's 1941 play Eurydice, where the story of Orpheus and Eurydice has previously been told quite impressively in Jean Cocteau’s magical surrealist film ORPHEUS (1950) and the spectacularly colorful BLACK ORPHEUS (1959), a Marcel Camus film that uses the lush backdrop of Rio de Janeiro’s Carnival, featuring the exotic delights of fabulous costumes, nonstop dancing, and wall to wall samba music.  While the play itself was written during the Nazi occupation of France, this historical context is completely left out of the film, though one can infer this may have been the reason it lingered for so long in the director’s imagination. 

In the opening interlude expressed in a montage of split screen images, a varied group of actors receive identical phone calls informing them that Antoine d’Anthac (Denis Podalydès), a friend and beloved theater director has died, requesting their visit to his country estate for the reading of his will.  Once the guests arrive, all gracefully met by Marcellin (Andrzej Seweryn), they are treated to a video performance of the Jean Anouilh play, where as the actors recall their own performances, Resnais blends a mixture of theater, memory, and real life into his own film.  While it sounds clever enough, what it amounts to is largely a filmed theatrical piece, using three different sets of performers, where Resnais interjects onto the screen two sets of older actors watching the movie who recall performing the play in their youth, where they are suddenly projected onscreen as the featured players alongside a video version of younger performers from La Compagnie de la Colombe which was actually filmed by Denis Podalydès.  With a brief break between the first and second acts where all the assembled players light up and smoke, Resnais simply films the entire play, intercutting brief elements of another more modern Anouilh play, Cher Antoine ou l'amour rate from 1969.  So while there is some interest in how the concept initially develops, there are no more surprises, and despite some of the best French stage and screen performers, there is little interest in the play itself, as it exists in a cautious, overly refined, and artificialized setting that accentuates the literary aspect of the play, adding little visual enhancement.    

While there is some pleasure in watching great actors, with Sabine Azema and Anne Consigny as Eurydice, matched by a young and vivacious Vimala Pons, from Jacques Rivette’s final film AROUND A SMALL MOUNTAIN (2009), and Pierre Arditi and Lambert Wilson as Orpheus, it must be said that the team of Azema and Arditi badly overact, adding a neurotic element that goes way over the top, turning this into an antiquated melodrama.  Rivette is probably the most brilliant director incorporating theatrical performances into his films, but he also infuses his characters with intelligence and a probing curiosity, where one can’t help but take interest in the energizing aspect of their appeal, as they are literally teeming with life.  But Resnais has made a film that only grows deadly boring after awhile, where the energy of the young and relatively unknown company actors consistently outshine the cadre of stars who never bring this piece to life, as it instead sits there onscreen like a stuffed shirt overly pleased with itself.  Never invoking the dramatic power and tragedy behind the immortal play, where the all consuming power of love offers Orpheus a chance to bring Eurydice back from the dead, which initially comes from Greek mythology, revisited in various artistic forms for literally thousands of years, from Plato, Virgil, and Ovid to painters like Titian and Puissin, as well as music from Monteverdi, Gluck, and Offenbach, this can only be considered a minor version of a master work, a pale comparison to the legendary Cocteau film, the second of his Orphic Trilogy Films, which notably does make historical reference to the buildings in ruin after World War II, using them as the eerie setting for his underworld, where the Orpheus trial was made to resemble the German inquests after the occupation.  While this was touted on the festival circuit as the swansong for Resnais, whose first film short was made back in the 30’s and first feature followed the war, there is yet another film already in post production, another collaboration with English playwright Alan Ayckbourn, his fourth film adaptation, where it will continue this obsession of aging film directors with literary works. 

Southwest (Sudoeste)

SOUTHWEST (Sudoeste)                   B-                     

Brazil  (128 mi)  2011  Super ‘Scope (3.66 Aspect Ratio)  d:  Eduardo Nunes

What starts out as a film with tremendous promise eventually dies a slow death of dullness and utter predictability by the end of the picture, as this is largely an exercise in visual stylization, shot by Mauro Pinheiro using Black and White film with a super Widescreen aspect ratio of 3.66, while ‘Scope is 2:35, but unfortunately a choice was made to shoot the movie on HD Video, so only the middle sliver of the screen is used, none of it in the sharp focus of 35 mm, while 30 to 40 % of the movie screen both on top and below are unused, which gives the feel of a movie that was simply projected wrong, and would be even less visible on a TV screen, probably unwatchable.  The director was present and he also reported the sound design was incorrect, as the stereo sound should move throughout the various sections of the theater and from front to back.  Granted, if the movie made use of an entire ‘Scope-sized movie screen, this might possess a more powerful effect, as the film is gorgeous to look at, but the real problem lies with the detached and uninvolving nature of the story itself, a combined effort written by the director and William Sarmiento, which near wordlessly follows one day in the life of a young girl Clarice who ages throughout the day, ending up near death from old age by evening.  Once the audience figures out what’s happening, as her character continually evolves to new actresses playing her part, which initially is so beautifully confusing, nothing that follows appears strange or unique, but just seems to predictably follow the storyline.  While there is a moody opening sequence, the cinematographer is obviously under the influence of Béla Tarr, who uses real film, by the way, but also uses extremely slow pans where the camera acts as an all observing eye, where nothing is ever explained, but sequences gather momentum as information is accumulated over time.  Not so in this film, where information detracts from the overall impact which is strongest in the beginning when the audience hasn’t a clue what’s going on. 

Supposedly ten years in the making due to lack of funding, as the film is too slow for commercial possibilities, the film is largely a fantasy realization but shown using a grim, ultra realistic look, shot in Brazil on actual isolated coastal locations, where ironically Brazil has no Southwest coast, all of which lends itself to magical realism.  But initially the dour mood that pervades the opening scenes is broken by the unexpected presence of a young girl, Clarice (Rachel Bonfante), who appears out of nowhere, but bears the same name as a previous character that is already dead and buried, where she could be a ghost or the secret appearance of her unborn child, also presumed dead, or simply a metaphor for life, which begins and ends all too quickly.  Bonfante is the best thing in the film, shot in the bright light of morning, as she barely utters a word but captures volumes of emotion on her face, where she always appears a bit puzzled, like a wandering spirit that is simply lost, but she innocently latches onto whoever feels like taking care of her and especially enjoys playing with another child, João (Victor Navega Motta), often sharing special secrets with him.  It was João’s curiosity that found Clarice in the first place, so she seems to have a special bond with him, which gets a bit peculiar when she ages, not realizing it herself, apparently, still acting childlike and playful.  But it turns out they share a special history that accounts for the peculiar opening sequence, but the only ones truly haunted by her presence appear to be the adults, who tend to avoid her, suggesting they are uncomfortable and in denial by what she represents.

As Clarice ages, the other young actresses never make that initial connection to match Bonfante, who truly dazzles onscreen, which creates a kind of disconnect with her character.  The film couldn’t be more detached and disorienting as it is, but when the characters become more ordinary, her storyline loses interest.  The youngest character delighted us with utter amazement, while the older characters simply lack her personality, where they appear less like an apparition or an unexplained oddity and more like a typical young girl.  Certainly what she undergoes is a bewildering transformation, but there’s little complexity about the experience that is shared with the audience, where instead she ages as is appropriate for the storyline rather than unexpectedly and with great surprise.  There’s an interesting festival pageant on a tiny scale in this poverty stricken village that produces a costumed character that can only be compared to a similar haunting presence of death in BLACK ORPHEUS (1959), where this outcome is equally appalling, leaving Clarice alone to fend for herself, where what’s particularly striking is just how isolated and alone she has become, where the pervasive mood swings to near horror.  There are subliminal images matching a haunting sound design that clearly indicate something is amiss, terrifying as in otherworldly, but the director neglects to follow up on this bit of unpleasantness and instead trudges forward with the inevitable that we knew was coming for the final two-thirds of the film.   Long, slow, and uninvolving, this will be infuriorating to some, very much in the feel of copycat Béla Tarr, but without the depth, stark imagery, acid humor, and modernist humanism on display. 

Note:  Kudos to Marilyn Ferdinand who has apparently written the first and only English language review found of this film at Ferdy on Films seen here:  CIFF 2011: Southwest (Sudoeste, 2011) - Ferdy on Films.